The presuppositions of David Easton's systems analytical approach to political science

[摘要] David Easton's systems analytical approach to politicallife as developed since the publication of his first mainvolume, The Political System, in 1953, has drawn muchattention from colleagues in the field of political scienceas a possible means, which, if put to use, could pull thediscipline of political science out of its doldrums, thoseof, mainly, fragmentation and general unreliability as meansof controllover the social process.Easton 's work wants to be in the mainstream of Americanpolitical science tradition. An understanding of thattradition goes far towards an understanding of Easton.Easton's assessment of that tradition is examined in ChapterOne. According to him the discipline of political science hasbeen groping towards the kind of scientific approach that hehimself advances. Political science is showing the firstsigns of becoming mature.Easton devotes himself to one aspect of the two-prongedtask that faces the discipline as he sees it: the developmentof value and causal theory. He devotes himself to the latterbut admits and stresses that it is founded on valuetheoretical suppositions that also need elaboration urgently.These two types of theory need to be developed as they havenot been due to the prevalence of reformative theory in thediscipline, a prevalence that is to be explained in terms of aneglect of the requirements of scientific method whichcalls for general causal theory as well as value theory.These three kinds of theory are explained in Chapter Two.Easton develops the notion of system, which had beenproper to the discipline of political science for some timeinto a full-fledged analytical framework of thought, hiswell-known flow-model, as discussed in Chapter Four. Thismodel has often been seized upon by students of politicalscience as if it is presuppositionless methodology,applicable to any concrete political system. That is not trueto Easton's aims which are to link political science to theother social disciplines in order to move towards therealization of the unified science ideal by way of generalsystems theory. His theory intends to focus on no politicalsystems in particular but upon the life-functions of anypolitical system at all. For application to any particularsystem the model would have to be adapted, modified.Easton is keen not to be categorized as a status quothinker along with so many equilibrium oriented systemsthinkers as may be clear from the contents of Chapter Three.That this has not always been sufficiently recognized, andthat value oriented reconstruction, purposive intelligence,is Eastonls concern becomes plain from his position vis a visthe behavioralist/post-behavioralist controversy as discussedin Chapter Five.That Easton's argument and the presuppositions on which itis founded leave themselves open to critical questioning maybe clear from the explanatory and commentary notes at the endof the chapters. That Christian conviction requires a stancecritical of this kind of thinking is my contentionthroughout.It follows that I am not gladdened by the appearance ofsimilar ideas from which to expect the solution to thedifficulties besetting the South African political scene.That such thinking does attract support also here is evidentfrom the President Council's Constitutional Committee's firstreport as I argue in Chapter Six. The recommendations made bythe Committee could well have been linked to a differentargumentation, hence their merit is not directly at issuehere. Should these recommendations be followed on the basisof this argumentation it would mean a marked deviation fromChristian political conviction to that extent.I say so as a matter of conviction and creed.

[发布机构] University of the Free State